Decades Before Oprah, Della Reese was the First Black Woman to Host a Talk Show: The digital remains are down to two 10-minute clips on YouTube. One is an episode with singer Eric Burdon of the Animals; another is with comedian Lou Alexander. No other trace has surfaced of a show that sits as an entry in the Lost Media Wiki, a crowd-sourced compendium of history’s abandoned media artifacts. Its disappearance has inspired curiosity as to whether these episodes will emerge from obscurity, resulting in at least one man’s dogged efforts to recover the show’s full archive.

Stark House has done it again -- a triple-decker of Harry Whittington westerns that includes Trouble Rides Tall, Cross the Red Creek, and Desert Stake-Out, with an excellent and informed introduction by the Whittington expert, David Laurence Wilson. I've said this again and again, but it's even more true this time: The introduction is worth the price of the book.I first read Cross the Red Creek in an Avon paperback long ago. It presents a situation that Whittington excelled at, a man in trouble who just keeps on getting deeper and deeper in the hole. Jim Gilmore, looking for a fresh start, is headed for the town of Kiowa City when he's surrounded by a posse and accused of robbing a bank. He escapes, but then in one of the story's first twists, turns himself in. A jury can't prove he's guilty, but only a couple of people in Kiowa City believe he's innocent. He doesn't care. He decides to stay, send for his wife, and settle there. Complications ensue.Plenty of action, some complex relationships, and some tense scenes that would be great on film, particularly a shootout in a burning barn. Although the story is ostensibly a mystery, you won't ever be in any doubt about who the villain is. That doesn't detract from the enjoyment, however, because what matters is the human relationships in the story and what Jim Gilmore comes to realize about himself and other people. If you're looking for a solid traditional western, you can't go wrong with Cross the Red Creek of the other two in this volume. Highly recommended.

The other morning about 3:00, several car loads of cops descended on the house next door to me. Flashing light bars, floodlights, the whole deal. My neighbor, I hasten to add, was totally innocent of any wrongdoing. His pickup had been stolen from his driveway and used as a battering ram on a local convenience store. The cops were making sure he wasn't part of the gang who did the deed. At the same time his pickup was stolen, a van was stolen from a driveway across town. The gang members used the van to haul away the ATM they took from the convenience store after battering down the wall. The Houston cops later found the van and the emptied ATM. The battering and taking of the ATM are all on video, but the gang all wore masks, so finding them is unlikely. It created some excitement for the neighborhood, but we're once more quiet again.This has been your Alvin Crime Report.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

abc7ny.com: Steven Hill, a versatile character actor in theater, films and television who achieved his greatest success late in life as grumpy District Attorney Adam Schiff on TV's long-running "Law & Order," died Tuesday. He was 94. Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.

StarTribune.com: In 1989, Donna Mae Wold was outed around the world as the longed-for “little red-haired girl” in the “Peanuts” comics strip. “Good Grief,” Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s biography of Minnesota cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, devoted an entire chapter to Wold, the Minnesota woman who got away — from him and from character Charlie Brown.

Andrew Bergman has written some dandy private-eye novels, not to mention the script for The In-Laws (the original). So how could you go wrong with So Fine, a movie he wrote and directed? Answer: You can't. Or I couldn't.Ryan O'Neal is Bobby Fine, an English prof up for tenure. His father, Jack Fine (Jack Warden) is an unsuccessful clothing maker, in deep debt to Big Eddie (Richard Kiel). Through a complicated set of circumstances, Bobby is kidnapped and set up as head of the company. He's also quickly involved with Kiel's beautiful wife, Lira (Mariangela Melato). While fleeing Kiel's bedroom, Bobby accidentally invents So Fine jeans (see poster) and saves the company from financial ruin.The movie's full of jokes, so many that you might miss one while laughing at another. It has the greatest production of Verdi's Othello ever. It has Richard Kiel lip-synching to "Walk Like a Man." It has O'Neal giving a version of Henry V's St. Crispen Day's speech to the garment workers. Maybe this movie's not as funny as I think it is. You can let me know in the comments.

No. 44 Stuyvesant – New York, New York: The Stuyvesants were the founding family of New Amsterdam, so it follows that their 220-year-old house on a street named after them in the Bowery (which derives its name from the Old Dutch word for "farm") still stands today.

Scientists have created an entirely new form of life in the lab: After making more than 62,000 changes to the genome of an E. coli bacterium, the researchers have essentially invented an entirely new form of life. This new supermicrobe will be so different from the natural tree of life that it will be resistant to all known viruses on Earth and will be capable of producing proteins unlike any found in nature, reports New Scientist.